On Tuesday, October 23 GSC will host Sarah Jane Bailes, Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sussex with an international reputation reflective of contemporary shifts in the aesthetic and political potentialities of performance as a medium. Sara is the author of Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (Routledge 2010), a major book on the late twentieth-century experimental theatre practitioners, and a co-edited volume on Beckett and Musicality (Ashgate, 2014). Her talk at Pratt entitled Moving Chairs will focus on the outdoor durational performance installation, This Here and That There (2007-2018), by Croatian artist, Vlatka Horvat. Considering the chair as an actant-object central to work’s particular change, Sara Jane Bailes will explore how these objects behave and produce within the inventive and unbound contexts of performance, articulating the political, intimate, surrogate, threatening or world-building potentialities that lie hidden in plain sight?

The talk by Sara Jane Bailes will take place on Tuesday, October 23 from 5 to 7 PM at Higgins Hall 018, Pratt Institute.

On Thursday, October 25 GSC will host Catherine Sameh, Assistant Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at University of California, Irvine. Catherine’s research focuses on gender, Islam, and women’s rights activism in Iran and the Muslim world. Before joining UC Irvine, she was the Associate Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and managing editor of The Scholar & Feminist Online. Catherine’s talk at Pratt, entitled Life-Affirming Endurance: Decolonial Feminisms in Iran and Beyond explores the links between the Occupy movement and Iranian feminism as a way of tracing genealogies of transnational solidarity that center a decolonial feminist episteme.

The talk by Catherine Sameh will take place on Thursday, October 25 from 12:30 to 2PM in the Alumni Reading Room, Pratt Institute Library.